Best Place to Sail This Winter is at the BVI Spring Regatta & Sailing Festival!

In the next few weeks, JAX, a custom 43’ performance wood and carbon sailboat owned by Oivind Lorentzen will ship from West Palm Beach, FL, to the Virgin Islands in time for the 2025 BVI Spring Regatta. With new and diverse boats almost always gracing the start line at BVI Spring Regatta, JAX is sure to add an element of intrigue to the range of racing boats competing in this year’s event.

Lorentzen, who grew up sailing in his hometown Greenwich, CT and Norway, is excited to escape the North American winter for some early pre-season training behind the wheel of his new boat, which was launched last year, competing in various regattas in Newport, RI, and Maine. A long-time sailor who was very active on the J/70 scene, Lorentzen became interested in having fun with wood albeit with a performance edge. He got involved with the wooden / classic boat regatta circuit with his restoration of an old one-tonner, The Hawk, designed by William Tripp and built in Bremen in the late 60s. Following that, he commissioned JAX, a two-year project built in Maine’s Brooklin Boat Yard.

“I rebuilt The Hawk just to get going and then thought it would be really fun to build a boat that combined the characteristics of a wooden boat together with something that was higher performance, as I have done a fair amount of J70 sailing in the last ten years,” Lorentzen said. “There is a lot of discussion among the classic / wooden boat circuit as to what sort of boats they should encourage building. There is a Spirit of Tradition class, and I felt that you can still evoke a spirit of tradition and have a high-performance boat so that’s been my mission – build a boat that can release when you get to the weather mark and at the same time achieve a certain aesthetic look and feel.”

He added, laughing, “Once you have got a boat up on a plane and enjoyed that kind of excitement it’s hard to push a lot of water around in a displacement boat!”

“I want to get as much practice and wheel time and sailing time as I can before this next season,” he noted. “Last season’s racing was challenging; we finished mid-fleet in the ORC Worlds then we did respectably in other races we competed in and I want to build on that – we haven’t got everything we could get out of the boat yet! It’s a project because she is competing against these carbon fibers, and she is mostly wood with some carbon fiber – you can’t optimize the use of wood today without some carbon reinforcement. The ORC classifies the boat as carbon as if there’s any carbon in the boat whatsoever, ORC classifies it as carbon. I’ve been working on a long letter…it’s not fair as we weigh significantly more than any carbon boat and we can’t get the same rig tensions as a carbon boat for example. It is just different but that’s what makes it fun. I’m hoping that something like this will open up peoples’ eyes to the ability to do both.”

Entries are building for this year’s BVI Spring Regatta – hosted by the fabulous Nanny Cay Resort and Marina, experts at delivering their best for world-class regattas like the RC44 / 44Cup racing out of Nanny Cay this week.

Long-time – and highly successful – BVI Spring Regatta competitor Tony Mack (Sussex, UK) is returning with his crew on a chartered J/122, and Charlie Garrard is back for his fifth Spring Regatta with his hugely enthusiastic Marblehead, Mass-based crew (did we mention costumes are always an option at Spring Regatta?). We’re looking forward to seeing familiar and new faces at this year’s BVI Spring Regatta and Sailing Festival – see you there!